Vol. 71/No. 46      December 10, 2007

Crandall Canyon mine in Utah was not inspected by mine safety agency last year, according to government report. Six miners were killed there in an August roof collapse.

Among the mines cited was the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, where six miners were killed in a roof collapse in August and three more died days later in a rescue operation that also injured six.

The report, issued by the office of the Labor Department’s inspector general, said the safety agency suggested it had conducted more inspections than it had really completed, presumably to inflate its enforcement record. Inspectors often failed to document basic tasks they were supposed to conduct, such as taking coal dust samples or checking high-voltage circuits.

Crandall Canyon was one mine where “critical inspection activities” were not documented as having taken place. In one inspection, 6 out of 22 critical safety tasks had not been documented. In another case, an MSHA field officer had to point out problems with inspections at Crandall Canyon to an inspector.

The report documented that in an inspection of Crandall Canyon, which began May 30 of this year, five inspection activities were falsely predated to February. This included a review of the roof control plan. If part of the late May inspection was actually done in February, the report could be omitting important information on the dangerous conditions at Crandall Canyon that led to the mine collapse in August.

Among the coal mines where inspections were not properly carried out is the Darby Mine in Kentucky, where five miners were killed in May 2006. Inspections were also inadequately conducted at the Sago and the Aracoma Alma No. 1 mines in West Virginia, where 12 and 2 workers died, respectively, in January 2006.

The government report stated that in southern West Virginia alone, 51 mine inspections were counted as having been completed despite the fact that they were started and then canceled.

In 2002 MSHA had a total of 605 inspectors nationwide. In 2006 this had dropped to 496. At the same time, underground mining had increased by 9 percent, the report noted.
 
 
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